29 Responses to “Predicting the Future”

“Razeghi says Iran’s government can predict the possibility of a military confrontation with a foreign country, and forecast the fluctuation in the value of foreign currencies and oil prices by using his new invention.”

“As such we expect to market this invention among states as well as individuals once we reach a mass production stage.”

Calling on nationalism and anti-establishment to boost his claim and gain support:

“The Americans are trying to make this invention by spending millions of dollars on it where I have already achieved it by a fraction of the cost.”

Over convenient methods

Just a touch of a computer tower can predict a hurricane in Tokyo.

Over convenient and nonsensical reasons why he can’t provide evidence

“The reason that we are not launching our prototype at this stage is that the Chinese will steal the idea and produce it in millions overnight.”

Regarding using the word “impossible,” I completely understand your perspective and probably agree with it, but I can’t help but feel this nagging sense that’s it is the incorrect word. It’s much like using “absolute certainty” in science — it just doesn’t feel right.

I don’t want to come off as excessively picky here; I agree your caveat “as much as anything can be said to be impossible in science,” remedies most of the problem, but I think in this case and many like it, it is also better to put the claim in context by using the word “currently” as well.

This claim is *currently* impossible, given our understanding and technology.

Enzo, I don’t share your discomfort, it seems so abstractly philosophical to not be able to say that what this crank is claiming is impossible. Plain and simple, no elaborate word games.

It bothers me somewhat that cranks use skeptics’ and scientists’ own logic and reason against them, by taking advantage of this very understandable fact: we don’t like to declare things impossible because it makes us uncomfortable. But you are too polite of a thinker and debater. It doesn’t make them at all uncomfortable to endlessly blab bullshit and take advantage of people and straight-up lie to everyone. We need to call them on it.

So my philosophy more recently has been this: declare obvious nonsense as “impossible”, I’ll be happy to eat my words later if I am wrong, since all of science and what I know will have been overturned and revolutionized anyway if it turns out to be true. But like Steven said, I won’t hold my breath.

My favorite expositor on the plausibility of paranormal phenomena is the physicist Sean Carroll. His article Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory should be required reading for all skeptics. Carroll explains that the physical laws governing the everyday human-scale regime are completely understood, and they rule out all paranormal phenomena. There are no ghosts, no afterlife, no ESP, no telekinesis, etc, because science has already shown that there are no particles or forces that could mediate those phenomena.

There are only two forces—electromagnetism and gravity—that can affect human-scale objects (like brains and spoons), and neither of those forces can interact with atoms in a way that would permit paranormal phenomena. If there were other forces that could do so, physicists would have already found them, because they have done the necessary experiments. There may be yet-to-be discovered forces, but they must either be too weak or too short-range to produce an effect on human-scale objects. This imposes a practical definition on what it means for a paranormal phenomenon to be “impossible.” It means that a large body of rigorous experiments must be wrong. That’s not impossible in the deductive sense of the word, but its probability is vanishingly small. Such a caveat is hardly worth a mention. For all practical purposes, paranormal phenomena are impossible.

I disagree that future (very limited) information is utterly impossible to access has I have had some very specific precognitive dreams. Please here me out.

I think there is an overlooked mechanism for this. It lies in the difference in the speed of one’s brainwaves when awake as opposed to the stages of sleep prior to dreaming. Since motion slows down time, this difference could make your waking time and sleeping time out of sync.

I think the precognitive information that is accessed as the inspiration to one’s dreams is only one’s thoughts, including future thoughts. The brainwaves encoded with this information would be accessible under this model. It’s not stored memory being accessed. This would explain why dreams are so hard to remember upon wakening as their content doesn’t exist in waking spacetime.

This won’t explain fortune telling, which I don’t think is possible, but it does explain why so many people say, I had a dream about that in retrospect or an intuition about something. The evolutionary benefit of this is enormous and it’s not a surprise that most mammals dream.

It is a proposed model of course, a hypothetical one, but it isn’t true that one can’t model a mechanism for precognition using standard physics and biology.

One’s thoughts don’t travel back in time, time speeds up while dreaming to collect it. My own dreams support this model.

I see your perspective, but if you’re going to go with the use-our-own-wording against us thing, you have to consider that if you say “impossible” flat out, they’ll do the same thing. They’ll throw “technically you can’t say impossible” right at us. I also think it alienates people on the fence about the issue; it sounds dismissive. That’s why I’m in favor of a polite “currently impossible” because you get the umphf of impossible but it may be more correct as well. Not that there is a way to win this either way.

jt,

Agree that some things are more appropriately called impossible than others.

Why is it necessary to say that Razeghi’s claims are impossible? Why can’t you just say they are not true. That pretty much covers it and allows us to avoid all this convoluted rationalizaton. All the evidence for its impossibility, as Novella calls it, is really just evidence for why we believe it is clearly not true. We don’t add any information by making the stronger claim.

Let’s say some was actually so much of a genius that they could invent a machine that could see into the future. What would you expect them to say?

“Hai guys! I invented a fewter-see machine but u can’t see it yet lol!!!! Believe me?”

Or something more like:

“I know this sounds ridiculous because I am aware of the current state of human knowledge and this violates all of that, but I have invented a fewter-see machine. I knew you wouldn’t believe me because it sounds ludicrous, so here is the evidence. Make of it what you will.”

Clark – all things that are impossible are not true, but not all things that are not true are impossible. They are not equivalent.

Evidence for impossibility is distinct from evidence that something is simply not true. Violating a basic law of physics is evidence that something is impossible.

This is really just an extension of plausibility arguments. Where we set the threshold of required evidence before we take a claim seriously, or act as if it is true depends highly on the plausibility of the claim.

Many of the comments have identified the features of a valid ‘future telling machine’ (FTM), but I think the obvious missing component is a Paradigm Shifter (PS). Without the PS,I’m afraid I’d have to call this FTM BS.

I have found that I can predict the future with 100% accuracy,but the tricky part is that because of the uncertainty principle (UP) if you try to look at my data (MD),you will collapse it’s intended path,and change the outcome,so it is imperative to, under no circumstances,look at my data.

tmac: “I have found that I can predict the future with 100% accuracy,but the tricky part is that because of the uncertainty principle (UP) if you try to look at my data (MD),you will collapse it’s intended path,and change the outcome,so it is imperative to, under no circumstances,look at my data”

Just in case someone gets the wrong idea about QM from the above, let me translate….

I have found that I can predict the future with 100% accuracy, but the tricky part is that, because of the uncertainty principle (UP), if anything interacts with my data (MD), it’s intended path will collapse, and the outcome will change, so it is imperative that, under no circumstances, anything interacts with my data.

Traveling back in time, for example, appears to be impossible, a reversal of the arrow of time, of cause and effect. Information cannot travel from the future to the past, and so we cannot have knowledge of the future.

Steven, I think you are making too strong a claim. It’s not that such things appear to be theoretically impossible. Rather, it appears that we only observe one direction and not the other. Theoretically, we don’t have a reason why this should be so. For example, there have been two AAAS symposiums on quantum retrocausation. The first was in 2006 and was titled “”Frontiers of Time: Retrocausation — Experiment and Theory”. The second was in 2011 and was called “Quantum Retrocausation: Theory and Experiment”. The description for the 2011 meeting was as follows:

Causation — the notion that earlier events affect later ones but not vice versa — undergirds our experience of reality and physical law. Although it predicated on the forward unidirectionality of time, in fact, most physical laws are time symmetric; that is, they formally and equally admit both time-forward and time-reverse solutions. Time-reverse solutions would allow the future to influence the past, i.e., reverse (or retro-) causation. Why time-forward solutions are preferentially observed in nature remains an unresolved problem in physics.

Laboratory evidence for reverse causation is intriguing but scarce; meanwhile, theoretical models for these results have not yet made deep enough connections with mainstream physics. Even the most basic physical constraints — e.g., whether reverse causation is best explained by energy transfers or simply by correlations without information exchange — remain open questions.

This symposium will explore recent experiments, theory, and philosophical issues connected with retrocausation. In particular, it is hoped that this meeting will help generate comprehensive theoretical models by which experimental results can be understood, and stimulate new experiments and collaborations by which the underlying physics may be more clearly exposed.

Of course, this does not mean that we should allow Razeghi’s claims to stand without evidence. However, we should consider the theoretical idea of retro-causation with less scepticism than presented here so far. And we know that once an idea is theoretically “more possible”, that changes how laboratory data is interpreted. Data can become interpreted less as error and more as real evidence for the idea.

I’m not quite sure what you are trying to say here, but it is true isn’t it that, althought time reversal is not “theoretically” impossible, there has never been a scientific observation that cannot be explained other than as a result of time reversal or retrocausation, and that includes so called quantum retrocausation.

“If you are ever tempted to suggest something does not obey the laws of thermodynamics, just don’t. You are wrong.” is a perfect response to certain forms of nonsense.

Not according to Daniel Sheehan, professor of physics at the University of San Diego. He has written,

Among physical laws, arguably none is better tested than the second law. It has been verified in countless experiments for more than 150 years. Most scientists consider its universality beyond reproach; even to question it invites ridicule and ruin. Nonetheless, over the last 10–15 years, the second law has come under unprecedented scrutiny. More than 60 mainstream journal articles, monographs and conference proceedings have raised dozens of theoretical and experimentally-testable challenges to its universal status – more than the sum total during its previous 150-year history. From a Kuhnian perspective this suggests a paradigm shift might be on the horizon.